Preserving the writing of BB for posterity. Another project of the AntiPorn Activist Network.

What the hell is pressure? I mean, there’s the kind of pressure that is obvious, like studying for an exam pressure and then there’s the kind of pressure that is subtle. Now, I think that everyone here can easily spot the more obvious types of pressure, you know, the pressure to meet a deadline, the pressure to pay your mortgage. But subtle pressure is a critter of a different stripe. Subtle pressure is all about masking the pressure, making it invisible to those who would otherwise become angry or frustrated at it. Subtle pressure is perhaps the more dangerous of the two because of how it works in the mind.

This patriarchal society is hands down the best at exuding a subtle pressure. It’s the sort of pressure that kind of sneaks in and encompasses you until you fail to even realize that it’s there.

So what has gotten me to thinking about all this pressure? Well, as a feminist I constantly think about pressure and I recognize many of the pressures that women are under just because they weren’t born with little floppy bits. Pressure, in the arena of women, is not something that I’m a stranger to, but have you ever had one of those moments when you thought you knew what kind of pressure you were under and then you had a big revelation that showed you that you underestimated that pressure so much that it became an entirely new animal?

Yeah, well color me pressurized I just had one of those moments the other day.

As a self-proclaimed feminist it is my job, and my obsession, to constantly look inwards and decide what is important to me. I take self-analyzing to a new level as I am constantly turning my thoughts to my own psyche. I ask myself constantly, “Do I really understand what is going on here? Am I really living by a set of guidelines that make sense? Is my ‘moral compass’ consistent with where I want it to be? Am I really living up to my own expectations? Do I completely understand why I think and feel the way I do?” etc. etc. and so on and so forth until my brain shuts down entirely and smoke spews from my ears.

Considering that I’m always looking at myself I am normally pretty surprised when something turns out to be not what I expected.

Now, this summer, after recognizing the subtle pressure placed on women to conform to a pre-pubescent beauty standard rigidly set in place by a bunch of horny white dudes I decided to experiment with shaving. The first step was to see if my crotch fell off if I didn’t ‘trim’ my bikini line during my daily showers. Several months into the experiment I realized that my crotch neither fell off, nor did I smell like rotten tuna (as men would have us believe) plus I had ‘shaved’ (pun intended) a few minutes off my normal routine. No more pulling hairballs from the drain after my shower, no more razor burn and most importantly a few more minutes onto my schedule.

“Wow, this is pretty cool” I thought to myself with smug satisfaction. Maybe I’ll try this on other parts of my body!

And so I did. I began to go longer and longer between shaves, cautiously inching my courage up a bit at a time. At first it was only a few days before I began fretting and thinking strange thoughts about turning into a gorilla or some hideous hell beast. Then slowly the time lengthened, day by grueling day and I found, much to my surprise that I didn’t ‘look like a man’ afterall. In fact, I looked quite like a woman and, once again, I had shaved precious minutes off of my shower.

“Wow!” I remarked to myself one morning, “It used to take me 20 minutes to shower, shave, shampoo, condition and so forth. But lookie here BB, you’re down to around 12 minutes or so! Way to go!” I found that the longer I went between shaves the angrier I was at ‘having’ to shave at all. And yet, I still didn’t see the vast amount of pressure that women are under to engage in the practice at all. I just figured I was resentful at having those extra minutes stolen from me once again.

In any case, I found as the weeks wore on, that when I ‘had’ to shave (i.e. when the weather was going to be really hot and I had to wear shorts *grin*) that I kind of regretted watching that fuzzy growth get washed down the drain. Slowly but surely I was becoming hairy. My crotch hadn’t fallen off, I didn’t smell like dead fish and my legs were actually kinda cool, plus I saved myself a whole 7 minutes!

So far I had come up against little or no resistance and while I still wasn’t brave enough to venture my hairy self outside in daisy dukes I was pretty content. My sons checked out mom’s new hair (on my legs of course!) and responded with mild disinterest even while I did the “Look at me! I have hair!” dance (yes, sadly, I did indeed do a sort of victory dance). Hell, I couldn’t get them to pay attention at all! Must be this shaving thing is really a no brainer eh?

Emboldened by my newfound confidence and the lack of my kids actually giving a shit I decided to take the leap. I removed the shaver entirely from the shower and I let my armpits go a few days. It was tough but I was kind to myself and when I found myself biting my lower lip in anxiety I would hop from the shower, soaking wet, grab the razor and have at it. Hell, the last thing I wanted to do was shock myself back into submission, therefore I did it slowly.

However, as the hair began to grow it began to dawn on me just how much subtle pressure we are under to keep ourselves nude. I began to understand when I really wanted to wear shorts but couldn’t muster the courage to walk out the door all hairy that there’s a hell of a lot of pressure out there. Where did this pressure come from? I wondered. And why, oh why did I never see the sheer VOLUME of it before now? Sure, I was aware of it, as a feminist I kind of have to be eh? With all that introspection and so forth it’s tough to miss it, but what I did underestimate was the sheer AMOUNT of the pressure.

I watched as the hair grew and I decided I liked it. Indeed, here’s a dirty little secret, *whispers*…..I realized that I kind of liked the way I smelled. Now, before anyone gasps and accuses me of flipping my stack or being a slob let me explain. Humans are supposedly gifted with their own unique smells; back in my swooning 20’s I would often smell my husband’s shirts while I was folding laundry. It was always something that was comforting to me and indeed, I noticed that men all do have a different smell. Now, I’m quite past the stage of sniffing my partners clothes while folding his laundry (ok, I’m past the stage of folding his laundry at all *grin*) but it occurred to me that I never knew how *I* smelled.

Turns out I smell pretty damned good.

With my new scent grabbing hairiness I found myself actually inhaling deeply and smelling…what else but ME! I found myself smiling because hell I’m a pretty good smelling gal. Now, here I’d like to point out that perhaps I’m a shade different than many other folks. I’m an honest to goodness earth person and I mean that literally and spiritually.

I have always been a very ‘smell centered’ person. Perfumes are generally too strong for me, I don’t personally wear them, and one of my biggest pet peeves is being stuck in a movie theatre with someone who is doused in perfume. Hell, most lotions are too smelly for me. The smells I love and adore are musky, earthy, outdoors smells. The smell of spring in the air, or of a thunderstorm (yes, thunderstorms DO have a smell *biggrin*). The smell of dirt on my hands when I’m in the garden is one of my all time favorites. Warm smells, earthy smells, I’ve even been known to grab a handful of good compost hold it up to my nose and cry, “Wow! That’s some might fine dirt!”. The smell of saddles and horse sweat in the barn mingled with the smell of hay is a smell that goes down on my all time favorite. These are all smells that I love. I guess I should just face it, I’m a ‘smelly’ person (yep, another pun that was intended).

The point is that when I began to get hairy I began to realize that I too have a smell and it was pretty good. I found myself sniffing and smiling happily at my newfound ‘trick’.

But then disaster happened.

About 3 days ago I changed into a tank top to do some work outside. My youngest son who is a mere 11 years old, looked oddly at me and proclaimed, “Gee Mom, don’t you think it’s time you shaved?”

I couldn’t keep the look of stunned surprised off my face. My little boy who is so sensitive and wonderful and who speaks so many wonderful truths about feminism is telling me in that patronizing way that I should shave so that I am more acceptable with his view of what a woman is ‘supposed’ to look like. He’s only 11 years old! This child of mine who decided two years ago that he liked to paint his nails and who did it just to prove that people should be equal (Yes, I know that his method is a bit flawed but he was only 9 at the time). My little boy who didn’t pay a bit of attention to my hairy legs was now telling me that I was, in essence, not holding up to my gendered status.

I was crushed.

And then I was angry.

And then I had my epiphany.

Wow, pressure. It seeps into us all, hiding beneath as a sort of expectancy that awaits unseen until you refuse to succumb to it. A child of eleven gets that there’s something ‘wrong’ with his mother if she doesn’t shave her armpits. When I asked him why I should shave I got a puzzled expression coupled with this, “I don’t know….it’s just weird you look funny mom.” And with that all the courage and pride I had been building just kind of seeped out of me.

And here, I had even tried wearing a sundress actually out without shaving my legs first. If my own son who has been raised in a feminist household, couldn’t see past the hair and felt the need to speak up, then what of the rest of this male dominated society? Whatever would I do when some dude stepped up to me, not to say, “Hey, nice ass” but instead to say, “Hey, why don’t you shave you freaky woman”. How was I going to deal with that?

And in one fell swoop it hit me like a stack of bricks. Pressure. It was all about pressure. Pressure of the sort that I never really ‘got’ in its entirety. Here I was fretting about what insult some horny dude would throw at me that I was terrified once more, my confidence was stripped from me, the implied threat of persecution for just being a woman snapped completely into place. This is not the sort of pressure to buy a given brand of shoes, that pressure I’ve never succumbed to. No, rather this is the culmination of the sort of pressure that one experiences when one understands that a threat that has always been implied could now bear fruit.

I realized that my fear of going out with hairy pits, or hairy legs, was akin in a very real way to the pressure I felt when I tried to thwart my abusive x husband’s agenda. There was always the ever looming fear that if I thwarted his plan that I would pay for it. This was the sort of pressure that, at its core, was all about fear. And not just fear of not conforming, fuck, I know all about not conforming, it was different somehow. It had a different feel to it, a different energy altogether.

In my mind I began to see monsters, a group of men standing outside the store became more frightening than ever and I finally got it. I finally understood this sort of pressure, the pressure for women to be sexually titillating to all men at all times, for what it was.

Talk about a revelation.

This summer I stopped shaving entirely and I found that there were parts of myself that I didn’t know about before and that I really kind of liked. In one fell swoop from the mouth of an 11 year old boy, I understood another important thing. This pressure that we are placed under is so pervasive that it causes the sort of anxiety that is at best uncomfortable; at worst it can be mind-numbing.

I understand a little more of this pressure now that I can see it for what it is. Seeing the enormous pressure placed upon women for this little tiny thing gave me a big start and it also made me question myself again.

For what it’s worth the hair is still there and I still like it, I’m not leaving the house in a strappy sundress anytime soon, but for me, for now, I’m happy.

Now, this post seems to be about shaving, but really it’s not. It’s about uncovering and examining the pressure that women experience that is totally unlike the pressure that men experience. This post is about confronting that pressure and the fear and understanding what it is that you are so scared of.

When I got to thinking about why I was so scared to leave my house with my new hair I realized that my worst nightmare involved having a man physically assault me because I was brazen enough to tell him to fuck off when he made a comment. Beneath it all was the horrifying fear of physical assault from someone who was so offended by my being a woman and bucking the status quo that he would physically assault me. In my minds eye I allowed my greatest fear to unfold just so that I would be able to pinpoint the exact thrust of my fears.

In my scenario I saw myself pumping gas or leaving a store and having a guy, or a group of guys, comment about my new hair. I saw me giving them the finger, telling them to fuck off and then saw them throwing something at me. Maybe a Coke bottle or a half-empty Snapple bottle. I saw me being powerless to stop it for what could I do?

So for me, I found that while my worst fear is probably pretty unlikely to happen, its roots were in fear. This society has at least taught me that there is always a threat hanging over my head. This threat, this silent warning is always ready to show itself if I step out of line. Now, this threat probably manifests itself in different ways for different women, but for me, I recognized that in this arena, as in others, I felt threatened by men. I feared that someone would do the unthinkable over such a little thing.

Which got me to wondering. If a man doesn’t shave for a few days does he fear a physical repercussion from women? Does he fear bodily harm from a pack of renegade females who dislike his beard?

Now, I’m not blind to the fact that this fear is probably baseless. I’m aware that it’s likely that the most I will ever get is strange looks or a few screams, but never mistake it, behind those catcalls lies that same veiled threat. Behind those reproachful looks and the snide remarks or the giggling lays the same threat. The threat that women live under their entire lives, the threat that “We will hurt you if you fuck up”.

Men have made an art form of violence. They violate each other, they violate the planet and they violate women. And women are left feeling small and weak in the face of the violence that they wreak with such cunning precision. Women are told and shown that to resist the violence of male’s means that they will then target their violence toward them. We are taught this and we know this as surely as we know our own genders. We know that there is rarely anyone who will speak out against their violence. We are taught that their violence is natural and normal and so we live, with the pressure of their expectations smothering us.

The promise is always that if we follow enough of their expectations that we won’t be targeted for their violence. That somehow we will escape it. But we always know that it’s there, and this is reinforced everywhere we go. We see the haunted eyes of women and the jumpy, overly-eager-to-please dispositions and we understand that this is a woman who has been reminded of their violence. And her pain becomes our prison and our pain, likewise becomes hers and so it culminated for me in the small voice of an 11 year old and I understood that the fear which lurks beneath so many of our actions and reactions is waiting just beneath the surface to remind me to shave my legs and armpits.

Pressure is a funny thing, how much pressure are you under? What ways does it manifest? How does it make itself known to you? Is there fear beneath your pressure as well?

Ok, for the last time, “You cannot make an analogy between violent pornography causing harm to women and action movies”.

You know, I see this defense over and over again. The person who pipes up, in the middle of a feminist discussion about violent pornography with this: “Fine, if you say that violent porn is bad because men can work up to these things then why aren’t you fighting against violent video games?” Invariably these asshats type out their dysfunctional diatribe with a self-satisfied smirk on their faces believing that they have just stumbled upon the equivalent of the feminist silver bullet.

Wrong boys. Try again.

This argument not only displays a frightening level of cognitive dissonance in those who are lame enough to use it but, more importantly, the argument is just plain silly. Sadly however, it appears that people really do believe that a cartoon showing violence against a drawn rabbit and a pornographic film of a real live woman being put into real live pain are really analogous. I’ve heard more arguments of, “You should be working to ban The Terminator if you’re going to try to ban violent porn” than I can stomach.

Now, the well read and well seasoned feminist can easily see the utter stupidity of such an analogy. So much so that we often refuse to even entertain it, however, for the benefit of the uneducated twits who continue to espouse this bit of overused tripe I will go ahead and describe, in full detail, why this is always a check mate in a feminist discussion.

In short, today is remedial feminism day here at The Den.

However, to be able to explain some of the reasons that this pro-porn argument falls flat we must look to a basic human drive: The drive for pleasure.

Humans, as well as other mammals, learn most readily through positive reinforcement. It has been known for a long time that, as a general rule, when a human being experiences something pleasurable then they are far more likely to engage in the pleasurable behavior again.

There is also a little thing that, in animal training circles and also in psychology circles, is known as “Self-Rewarding Behavior”. A self-rewarding behavior is any number of actions which, for the doer of the action, produce a reward which is not dependent upon another person to give. Many animals engage in self-rewarding behavior, that is, a behavior which produces pleasurable results to the participant that they can engage in without aid from anyone else.

Why are these concepts important? Well, in terms of violent pornography and the propensity of human males to have their views of women ‘tainted’ by their chosen medium these concepts are very important.

Orgasm, as it pertains to humans, is arguably the most intense of the pleasurable feelings for the person experiencing it. Humans, like most other critters, won’t normally engage in behavior that they find NON-pleasurable. Example: If you derive no pleasure from being hit then you will most likely try to avoid being hit. Likewise, if you derive lots of pleasure from being hit (forgetting for a moment the mental health issues with such a thing) then you will likely seek out someone to hit you.

Now, it is well known to researchers who study both humans and animals that most creatures will learn far quicker and far more solidly through positive reinforcement. Before I start my upcoming analogy I want to tell everyone that I’m NOT an Evo-psych proponent, however, with that in mind I will try to draw an analogy here and I’m hoping that everyone will see where the analogy comes from instead of saying, “Hey BB, are you saying that humans are animals? Because I remember one thread a long time ago where you got pissed off over this.” So bear in mind where this analogy is going and what it’s intended to do.

I have spent quite a few years training animals. Dogs and horses being the two species that I have the most first hand experience with. For this analogy lets take a common behavior that people would pay me to ‘fix’ in our canine friends.

People would come to me with a dog that wouldn’t ‘come’. I would take the owner and the dog out into an enclosed area and ask the owner to turn the dog loose and then I watched. Invariably I would see this (or similar) string of events:

At which point I laugh my ass off and respond by saying, “NO, the dog is fucking BRILLIANT!”

The dog was a smart dog, after all if you were a dog would you want to come back to an owner who hits you and screams at you every time you return to them? Then its time to do a bit of role reversal (and for those of you who are curious, YES I have actually done this with clients in the past). I explained to the clients that we were going to do a little test. First off I will not be speaking to you in any way that you understand me (normally I would simply say, “Blah, blah, blahblahdoodeblah”).

Then I would tell the person that their job was to act like a dog. When we got into the role-playing aspect I would wait a few moments as we walked around the property but soon I would begin yelling, “BlahBlahblah!” at them and motioning with my hands. The owner, who was busy assuming that I wanted them to stay next to me, would stand there and look at me while trying to be a ‘good dog’. In my mind, I wanted the owner to ‘Sit’ but I never told them that. In any case, as the scenario played out I would take the owners hands and slap their hands before screaming, “BlahBlahblah!!!!” at them until the owner was completely flummoxed and invariably ran away from me. It was then that I would begin chasing them screaming, “BlahBlahBeeDoopBeBlah!!!!”

At which point we would both start laughing, you see, the dog was pretty damned smart after all eh?

We would then do the same scenario, only this time I used positive reinforcement to get what I ‘wanted’ from the owner. We would start off the same way, but this time my voice got quieter and my ‘blahblahblah’ was softer. I used my hands to touch the owner’s hips and I’d say, ‘blah’ nice and quiet. Within moments the owner figured it out and sat on the ground at which point I would smile and hand them a candy bar.

The point of this ridiculous trip down memory lane is to point out that ALL creatures learn faster, better, and happier with positive reinforcement. ALL creatures enjoy positive feelings and experiences and they seek to replicate them whenever possible.

Enter orgasm and, in particular, masturbation.

Now, it’s also important to note that we also learn by repetition. When we are rewarded, (or reward ourselves) over and over it becomes far more likely that we will engage in the same behavior.

Orgasm is arguably the most powerful tool that we have in our arsenal of positive reinforcement. Orgasm initiates the release of very powerful chemical in our brains which leave literal chemical implants in the surface of that grey matter. (I will pull the cites for it later, I have them on the harddrive but my time is fast growing short) It has been shown that orgasm, and the release of the all important endorphins that come with it, leaves lasting chemical ‘markers’ in the brain. Chocolate cake doesn’t do it, neither does just about any other thing that we experience on a regular basis, but orgasm DOES.

Now, let’s try to tie it all together ok?

With violent pornography (ok, ALL pornography) we are exposing our brains to a heady dose of chemicals that will leave a lasting impression upon the surfaces of the old grey matter for a very long time.

We are using repetition to, in essence, ‘train’ a given set of associations to a given behavior. Just like ‘triggers’ for people who deal with PTSD or other such trauma related conditions we are placing ‘triggers’ into our own minds when we masturbate and orgasm to violent images. In essence a ‘trigger’ is something that brings back the feelings that a trauma survivor experienced. Many times these ‘triggers’ are things that imprinted upon the brain during a time of particular stress. For many people a ‘trigger’ can be a place that reminds them of where they were when violence was wreaked upon them, for others it’s an image, or a certain touch or a smell.

But what if those ‘triggers’ were associated with very pleasurable memories?

When we masturbate to violent, degrading pornography we are, in essence, placing ‘triggers’ inside of us while simultaneously reinforcing it with what is arguably the most powerful feelings of pleasure the physical body is capable of. We are literally etching chemical ‘pictures’ in our heads of whatever we were viewing at the moment of orgasm. These ‘pictures’ remain, oftentimes for an entire lifetime, and they become a ‘trigger’. When something we see reminds us of that image we are then reminded of the extremely pleasurable sensations we felt when we last saw the ‘trigger’.

We are literally conditioning our bodies to respond in a physical way (i.e. sexual arousal) to the ‘triggers’ that we have etched into our minds. We are using the pinnacle of self-rewarding behavior, (masturbation) to repeatedly imprint a given scenario in our heads which we have trained ourselves to associate with the most pleasurable feelings that the human physical body is capable of.

Don’t fool yourselves people, this is a dangerous as fuck phenomenon.

At BEST a lifetime of viewing degradation, violence and pain inflicted upon women will cause you to not be able to orgasm without the use of such visuals whether those ‘visuals’ be physical pornographic pictures or mental ‘visuals’ that aren’t ‘real’.

This is the BEST case scenario. Worst case scenario? Your head becomes so mired and stuck in ‘violence against women is the equivalent of the pinnacle of pleasure’ that you attempt to act it out by either A) Talking a woman you presumably love and care about into pretending to be your rape victim or B) Actually raping a woman.

There is no other outcome to a chemical saturation that imbeds these ‘triggers’ into your mind.

Now I’ll go ahead and answer the question from above:

“BB, you have a problem with violent pornography? Well, why aren’t you going after violent video games?”

My answer: If people were masturbating to violent video game images designed specifically to arouse and bring about orgasm then they would no longer be violent video games but would instead become violent pornography.

The simple fact of the matter is that there can never be a comparison between a movie, a video game or a song and the repeated, prolonged, and conditioned response that one sees when one has spent a lifetime masturbating and etching images into ones head.

It is the masturbation (i.e. the orgasm) which makes the pornography far more dangerous than the average violent video game.

Most boys are exposed to pornography before the age of 13. When these boys die they will likely have practiced the pinnacle of self-rewarding behavior (i.e. masturbation) many times more than they will have experienced the actual act of sex with another human being. Under these circumstances, knowing what we know about repetition, it is far MORE likely that these boys will have absorbed the messages that pornography is sending them FAR more than they will ever have absorbed the messages that real, live women who have real live sexual relationships with them send.

On average young boys are engaging in masturbation to pornographic images far more than they will ever have actual, physical sex with a woman. Therefore, the chances of having the chemical etchings and instilling the ‘triggers’ into their minds via what pornography shows them will indeed have a far greater chance of being permanently instilled than any experience they have with a real live woman.

Of course, it really shouldn’t take a huge post to get this message across but some folks still insist on hiding behind ignorance and refusal to use any sort of critical thinking (or at the least to use Google to search for actual data). These same folks are the ones we hear saying things like, “Well, you should ban violent music as well, and while you’re at it you should go after Cowboy movies too!”

Perhaps us crazy radical feminists would be going after cowboy movies if they were designed to bring about an orgasm through repeated watching designed to condition the viewer to be sexually aroused and masturbate every time a showdown at high noon is mentioned.

And now that we’ve covered that topic again I hope not to have to deal with it for a good, long time.

It’s a search I get all the time, and each and every time it pops up on sitemeter

I want to scream at the top of my lungs.

A few weeks ago I was sitting at my desk sipping gingerly on my hot cup of coffee. I popped into sitemeter to log the searches and there it was again, “FreeXXXpics” my hand trembled and my smile turned into a frown of wrath and fury. What was it about this particular phrase that sent shockwaves through me?

I very nearly threw my coffee cup at the wall that day, so enraged was I by the search. Clearly, this shit was getting to me. Several days later, I took my burnout time but now I’m back again and the phrase is still haunting me. So, this morning amidst the chaos of homeschooling, networking for the rape campaign, researching and so on I decided to plug in my Zoo Tycoon for a few minutes.

As I was cleaning my virtual Rhino cage it hit me. In a flash a lightbulb went off over my head and I closed the program and began to write, the first draft of that writing was confused and garbled. Perhaps it still is now but I suspect that remains to be seen.

The FreeXXX search bothers the fuck out of me because it shows callousness so deep, an entitlement so broad, that it literally bounced entirely off my paradigm for all this time.

“FreeXXXpics” exposes its searchers for exactly what they are, male privileged fucktards who feel that they are so entitled to women to degrade that they shouldn’t even bother paying for it.

They want to use as many women as possible with as little outlay, and one phrase keeps ringing through my head, they don’t even feel they should have to pay for it. The women, the scads of women being paid next to nothing, all of them have stories, all of them have lives, none of them looked lovingly at Mommy and Daddy as a child and said, “I want to grow up to be a FreeXXX girl”.

These women had hopes and fears and dreams and aspirations. These women were little girls with button noses and piggy tails who trotted around the playground at recess. All of their dreams from childhood, their aspirations of being veterinarians or schoolteachers or botanists are gone and what’s left? A cunt. A pussy. An object.

A thing.

Those lost dreams of having ponies or growing up to be a doctor or counselor or marine biologist are shattered on the floor like so many shards of glass. Their stories are individually different, individually unique but as a collective most of them tell a very similar story. How many abusive boyfriends did it take to train them to be the FreeXXX girl? How many pushes, punches, rapes, and abuses did it take for them to finally watch as their dreams fell from that high shelf in their minds and shattered into fragments of lost hope on the floor?

All that pain, all that loss, all those souls and dreams and aspirations…and they’re not even worth a fucking nickel. Not a dime, not a quarter, not a fucking cent.

They’re worth a wad of cum in some jerk-offs hand and he won’t pay them a cent.

I don’t know why, but the fact that their dreams and hopes aren’t even worth a fucking cent to these men grates on my very last nerve. It angers me in a way I can barely describe. I can see the faces in my mind and I roll back the years to a little girl in braids, who is swinging on a tire swing, or a dark haired little girl riding a pony, or an African American little girl playing in a schoolyard. I see dollies and trucks and fishing poles. I see small hands playing in dirt, picking up worms or playing dress up.

I was a child once. They were children once, just as you, just as your mother, your sister, your aunt. At some point they saw a person on TV, maybe it was a Veterinarian, or a Scientist or even the fucking President and they looked up at their parents and with a big smile said, “That’s what I want to be when I grow up”.

What happened to them? Men happened to them. Society happened to them. They bought into the idea that transforming themselves into a cunt, a pussy, a sexbot was empowering AFTER they realized that Vet, Scientist and President were out of the question.

How many dreams do you see around their dead eyes when you type in that horrible phrase? And why don’t you even feel it’s worth a penny to you? How could you? How could you feel so entitled to women and cunts and pussy and your own chubby little cock that you can look at them and NOT see the sparkles of the glass that was their aspirations?

I can see nothing but the reflections of shattered hopes.

These men have no value for life, no value for emotion or dreams of anyone but their own. They don’t even think that her lost dreams are worth a measly dollar, they are worth less than a candy bar from a vending machine. They’re worth less than a cup of coffee at the gas station. Their aspirations don’t even merit the same worth as a piece of penny candy, so much so that they go out of their way to specify that their degradation MUST be free.

What scorn and disdain for life these men must have.

I’m sitting here on my laptop and I’m remembering the point at which I stopped fighting it. The point at which I stopped resisting the oppression around me and I succumbed to it entirely. What was their breaking point? What moment was it in their lives that pushed them to stop fighting it?

It’s a horrible thing to be apathetic to the pain and sadness of another soul. It’s even more horrible to actively seek out that pain and sadness. The worst sort of horror is when you say that you aren’t willing to give up a fucking thing to be able to get off to that pain and sadness.

These are the FreeXXX girls.

These are the daughters of the Patriarchy, these are the women that the institutions of man has created and I bleed for them. These are the girls who men don’t even care enough to pay for. These are the women that are truly expendable in our society and they know it. They’re the FreeXXX girls, the FreeHotttCunts, they are the girls that male society hates and loathes and yet craves to get off on.

It must make men feel so superior and powerful to have that kind of misery, the sadness and legacy of broken dreams and shattered lives, at their fingertips. It must be such a power rush for them to see these women, these living, breathing, feeling women, reduced to mere holes for their amusement, degraded and humiliated. And to be able to acquire this sort of power, the sort of power that the nerdy geek-boy who’s a closet misogynist has always longed for, to be available for free.

There can be no doubt that the Patriarchy takes care of its own. It supplies degradation and power for free at the click of a mouse. How many of them? How many faces and lives? The FreeXXX girls, the slut of cyberspace, the fuckhole object who has her face cum upon by countless millions of men. The ultimate object, free, ready, voiceless and faceless a mock-up of the male fantasy of control and domination right there for every male to violate and use.

Yes, the Patriarchy takes care of its own. Creating women who are lost and alone, posing them, starving them, addicting them to whatever drugs and numbing medication they can use to dull the pain and then putting them out there for free. And, to ensure that it has covered its bases, after destroying their hopes and dreams, after locking them into pink collar hell and taking every ounce of power and autonomy they can have, after training them for 18 years they cover their tracks by saying, “It’s her CHOICE!”

And that is supposed to be the end of the discussion.

But it’s not the end for me. The audacity of these dudes that they won’t even pay a cent for the misery and suffering of these women, that they specifically request to have their objects free makes my stomach churn with an emotion I can’t even identify. A strange mixture of hate and sadness and rage roils in my gut, threatening to spill out and onto my keyboard.

Even now, thinking about those words with that FREE stipulation added to them I am shaking and sick. It says much about our world that the FreeXXX girl has become so popular; it says much about the mindsets of our worldwide culture that a woman can be stripped of everything and be free for the taking. That she can lose her dignity, her autonomy, her personhood, her dreams, her life, her aspirations and she is so worthless, and all that she has lost is so worthless, that she is free to whomever wants to use her today.

The FreeXXX girl is the equivalent of the free bumper sticker. Cheap, worthless, and only there to get out the message. That message being: “Come one, come all, we gotcher’ degradation and objects here”. And to uphold this institution of man we must have a lot of these women available, we must teach them that they are better than the freeXXX girl at all costs. That they are not only better but that they can have her like oxygen or food. She is one more consumable resource to men and how many of them are there? How many do they see?

Are they looking at 20 FreeXXX girls per ‘session’, 3 sessions a week? 240 a month? How many faces do they remember? I wager that few of them remember any. The faces are interchangeable to them, the dignity and dreams and the little girls hiding inside the shaved bodies and starved torsos are interchangeable to the men who seek them out.

This is the entertainment of our ‘culture’ (and yes, I use the term loosely). This is the entertainment that makes more money than almost every other form of sporting entertainment combined. This is the number one entertainment for our world, the FreeXXX girl, the unlimited access to the most wretched and disposable members of our society. You can tell a lot by a society’s entertainment, what do you see when you look at ours? Where do women fit into that equation?

Look at Rome. What do you see when you think of that civilization, gruesome blood sports? Gladiators? No surprise that Rome was a violent culture, look at what they enjoyed doing in their spare time.

Look at us. What does our entertainment look like? Shattered women, displayed, distorted, starved and shaved. They are eerily reminiscent of slave markets where the slaves were ‘advertised’ with few (if any) clothes on, degraded, stripped, unempowered.

There is little surprise that our society is a rape world, a rape culture for a rape world. There is little surprise that women are the largest group of poor, the largest group of welfare recipients, and the largest group of the abused.

Years ago this country, the U.S.A., outlawed slavery. It outlawed men being able to take their egos and self-esteem from the complete degradation of other humans. But women, who were the driving force behind outlawing slavery, were soon to literally take the place of the slaves. Women of all color, black, asian, white, it didn’t matter; men, white men, black men, asian men, all knew that they must, at all costs, continue to abuse at least one segment of society. They must, at all costs, keep at least one group available for mass consumption, for mass degradation, for mass hatred, and the men, all of them, decided that they could unite in the oppression of women.

Years ago our country outlawed keeping slaves, but women of color were never freed and women of all stripes soon took the place of domestic slave. Sure, they did it before the new laws, women have always held the same place as the FreeXXX girl, a place of worthlessness, of expendability, but now, with men being able to unite in their oppression of women, ALL women took the brunt of what was. And that continues to this day.

And today, this very moment, dreams are being lost and right now, as I type this some woman has had the shit kicked out of her one too many times and her beautiful sculpture that represents all of her hopes and aspirations is crashing to the floor. Right now another FreeXXX girl is being created. She will be sacrificed at the altar of male pride and ego, the altar of the penis because she MUST be sacrificed. She MUST be made available to anyone who wants her and she is made for men. She is empty and hollow and servile because she must be to feed men’s lust for power and control.

I figured out today why the FreeXXX girl makes me hurt so badly, why my hands shake and my mind becomes filled with useless babble, she is a marker of what every woman is to men. She is the embodiment of what men project onto the masses of women, the millions of us who are trying to crawl out from under the boot of the Patriarchy. She elicits within me so much anger and shame and fear because she is what they want US to be.

Hopeless, robotic, empty vessels that they can use and discard. Emotionless things who appear only to be used and degraded and then disappear with the click of a mouse.

I yearn for a world when every man looks at that computer and sees, in brilliant clarity, not the cunt or the pussy or their own flaccid penis, but rather the sparkles of the dreams that were. I long for the day that they see the glass on the floor when they see her face and her dead eyes and the idea sickens them and they turn away with the click of a mouse.

She shouldn’t be Free, her dreams were worth something, her emotions, her smile, her humor her intelligence, they were worth something. They are worth something, they’re worth a million of the men who would use her today. And that is a price I’m willing to pay.

Mink Stole brings up a point from ‘Lesbian Caricature’ that I have been meaning to address for a long while but have been unable to formulate words on the topic. Women and porn.

It’s high time I did something on it though because, quite frankly, it comes up rather frequently. It’s almost as if the phrase, “But BB, women look at porn too” is intended to completely remove any and all problems with porn just because, ‘women look at it too’.

It’s a topic that needs addressing and, quite frankly, I’ve held off on it because I don’t want to alienate any women reading who are currently ‘on the fence’ so to speak, over pornography and the harm it does. Unfortunately it’s been coming up more and more lately and I don’t think I can hold off on it anymore.

First I want to acknowledge Mink Stole and her (rather brave) comments. Kudos to you for telling us about your experiences as well as filling in some of the blanks I had on gay male pornography. And now I’m going to jump right onto the bandwagon and come right out with my story.

I too used porn and I am a woman. For a many years when I was younger, I looked at pornography. My soon-to-be-X really started it for me. Until that time I had obviously seen porn and I had even watched it at the prodding of my first X but I never ‘used’ it myself, as in, I never popped in a video when I was by myself to masturbate to. My second husband changed all that and within a few months of moving in with him I was actively watching it as well.

Like Mink I also watched quite a bit of BDSM porn. It didn’t start out that way, but it sure as hell ended up that way. My X inaugurated me into it and my ‘porn phase’ lasted around 2 years (give or take). Mind you, that was 2 years that I was actively using it myself rather than just watching it to pacify the man I was with.

Like Mink I too changed my mind. This happened slowly however. What I can tell you from my experiences as a woman is that initially I was repulsed by pornography. My stomach would churn and grind and my face would remain frozen in a mask of disgust and, I daresay, apprehension and fear. Slowly though, this changed for me, but it never changed completely.

Even whilst I was actively seeking porn out I would always feel dirty and stained after I watched it. I would look for the stuff I wanted to see, watch it, masturbate, orgasm and then promptly go and shower. It’s a very difficult sensation to describe, this sort of revulsion coupled with the compulsion to look at it in the first place, this strange cycle of compulsion, justification, masturbation, revulsion and cleansing.

I began to realize that there was a serious problem when, one night, I was having sex with my husband and realized that I was seeing porn images in my head while we were being intimate. I noted this relatively early on and it troubled me. It bothered me that I was ‘seeing’ porn in my mind, that I was seeing the degradation of women (and yes, it was pretty much always women) and getting off to it even when the actual tapes were no longer playing.

At first this was an unsettling occurrence, a strange intrusion, but I wrote it off. I would recognize the image in my head and I would try to turn my mind elsewhere, like maybe onto my actual husband, the man whom I loved and cherished (at that time anyway). But, after a time, focusing on my husband began to feel strange, harder somehow than just thinking about the images I had seen before. It was easier to regurgitate the stuff I had seen earlier in the day, or earlier in the week.

There came a point where this became very troubling. A point in which I began to feel dirty and stained from the images my head and my television were spewing out at me. There came a time when I began to shower after sex, NOT because I just wanted to shower, rather because I felt just as dirty as I did when I was watching the porn.

There was a problem and it was making me feel simultaneously dirty, sexual and self-conscious. Slowly but surely I began to question the things I was seeing. I began to wonder why I despised those women and yet was using them, even in my own head, to get off to. Slowly the veil began to thin and the guilt and disgust I would feel afterwards would grow stronger than the compulsion to look at the stuff in the first place.

Eventually I sat down and had an honest discussion with myself. I asked myself honestly, what was I getting out of porn? The answer surprised me. It terrified me. It shamed me and disgusted me and the twist in my gut that I felt when I heard my own answer, the defensiveness and immediate arguments that sprang to my mind proved, more than any lie detector test, that the answer was indeed correct.

I was getting a sense of power from watching the humiliation and degradation of the women on the screen.

I was claiming power, the all-elusive power that women strive for their entire lives, from degrading and enjoying the degradation of other women. I had absorbed a lesson from the patriarchy: women are easy to degrade, weaker, and more vulnerable, so much so that even another woman can take their power. Watching women being slapped and hurt was filling that void within me that was taken so many years before by men. It allowed me to feel powerful and in control.

That’s what I was getting out of it. I was getting a sick satisfaction at watching other people be humiliated.

For me it had to be women I watched. The thought, the very idea of taking control from a man could not, ever, manifest in my mind. The idea of humiliating a man was so foreign to me that my mind discounted the possibility of it immediately, before it even blinked on the radar. I had spent my life with men controlling me it was clear, at least to me, that I would never get power from them. Instead, I turned to women even more vulnerable than me. Women who were even EASIER targets to take power from than I was.

Clearly, these women were pained, and I watched it. I saw it in every movie, in every picture, in every scene. I watched and heard the fake screams and I took power from their misery. I watched their faces twist for just a moment into a face of pain when they were penetrated anally; I saw it and I used it to make myself feel better. In some way I was taking their power. It was ME, it was certainly ME wielding the power over them in my mind, and it was the thought of ME taking their power on the screen that brought me to climax.

It wasn’t the sex, it wasn’t the vaginas or the breasts or the tanned skin. It wasn’t some sort of biological excitement from seeing two people having sex (although, that’s what I told myself for a very long time). It was the power that is inherent in degrading and humiliating another human being that brought me climax. I was stealing THEIR power, taking it from them in my fantasies and on my TV. With every orgasm I was stealing the little dignity that these women had left and using it to feed my own, seriously lacking, seriously damaged, sense of power and control and self-esteem.

And I hated them for it. I hated them for reflecting my own weaknesses back at me. I despised them for allowing their dignity to be taken from them, just as I had done myself. These women were, in so many ways, a reflection of me, of my OWN powerlessness, and I hated them for ‘letting’ themselves be used in such a fashion.

At the same time I hated MYSELF for using them. I hated myself for being a vampire of sorts, a kind of ‘self-esteem vampire’. A creature which was incapable of making her own self-esteem and who therefore took it from other humans. But self-esteem garnered at the expense of another human being does not, and never can, replace your own. It simply drains from your body because it never belonged to you in the first place. Power that is stolen from another person is always empty power, it never fulfills, it never leaves its mark on you for more than a few days, sometimes even a few hours.

This is the hallmark of EVERYONE I have ever met that uses pornography, males and females alike: low-self esteem and a horrible fear of being exposed as being weak. The common theme inherent in everyone that I have ever met who uses porn is low-self esteem, oftentimes depression, a sense of worthlessness, and a sense of being out of control. Porn becomes the mechanism by which these folks, males and females alike, gain control. There is an almost universal deep-rooted sense of insecurity, combined with a fear of failure. And these fears and these worries are alleviated, at least for a time, through porn.

But it’s not as simple as that because stolen power is never power and the sense of control only lasts for a little bit before the same old fears come creeping back in. The same old doubts, the same fears of failure, the same insecurities.

Pornography is about control. It’s not about sex, it’s not about lovemaking. There is nothing natural, normal or healthy with pornography.

Yes, women use pornography, but the fact that women use pornography doesn’t make the dangers of pornography disappear. Rather, it brings them into sharper focus. Women who are using pornography are getting high on the same sense of control that men are. Women who are using pornography are degrading the women in their mind and hating them for the same reasons that men are. The difference is that women will many times wake up of their own accord. Since we ARE women, we see the degradation and we, just as men, train ourselves to get off to that degradation. Unlike men however, we realize that we ARE women and sometimes, oftentimes, this realization hits us when the men we’re with begin to want to degrade US in the same way that WE are degrading the women in our minds, or the women on our computers or on our TV’s.

It is then that many times we will realize the dangers and see that WE were only a tiny margin away from being THAT woman ourselves. When our partners begin to want to degrade US the way that they degrade THEM, the false distinction that we make in our own minds between US and THEM disappears entirely. Then we realize that we are just as vulnerable as they are. It is then that we understand that we are no different than the porn stars, we are just as vulnerable to men as they are, and the power and control that we believed we were getting was simply not real. It was just a phantom, and now we’re being asked to perform those same acts.

That moment comes for many women. That moment when their partners ask for the things that the porn stars did. And we recognize the trap that we’ve laid for ourselves.

That’s what happened with me. Soon my husband began to ask me to do the same things for him that the porn star was doing. What could I say then? I mean, after all, I was watching the same damn thing he was and he knew it. If I didn’t do those things then I would have to admit to myself that they were degrading and I’d see the paradox, I’d see the holes in my illusion. I’d be forced to see that I wouldn’t want those things done to ME, and yet I wanted to see them done to other people.

So I did them. I did them and I tried to pretend that I liked them. I tried to act like the porn star because I was invested. Soon however, I began to see JUST how horrible it felt to have cum on my face. Just how terrible I felt when he called me a ‘whore’ and a ‘slut’. I realized that when he asked me, “Do you like that you little whore?” and I moaned “Yes, fuck me harder” that I really didn’t like the way I felt afterwards.

I finally saw it all for what it was and I finally sat down and had that talk with myself. I finally saw my intentions and what I was getting from the porn, what I was getting from watching women be called names and be spanked. I saw it and it fucking scared me to death. It scared me and it shamed me and even now, at 6:30 pm on a Monday night a full 12 years later I am still shamed.

This was a post I didn’t want to write. This is my own confession; this is the story of a woman who watched pornography, who consumed the pain of other women to soothe my own painfully damaged confidence and self-esteem.

It was only after I pushed the pornography from my life that I was able to feel good about myself. It was only then that I began to be able to be honest about the things that I liked and didn’t like. My husband didn’t like it. He raged at me, angry that I would ‘suddenly’ take away ‘his right’, that I would do such an about-face.

He continued to watch. He continued to ‘indulge’, openly at first, and then on the sly when he realized that I refused to let it in my home. I watched his slow progression into wanting more from me. The way he took his confidence from me, the way he fought the battles with me over sex, over the things I would and would not do for him.

For those men and women who insist that pornography is harmless I ask, why do you watch it?

For most people that answer is, ‘Just to masturbate to’, but I’ve found that I’ve never met someone who watches porn who is truly confident.

When I was watching porn I was more insecure than I have ever been in my life. I was chaotic, I drank too much, I self-medicated with alcohol and sedatives to numb myself to my own sense of worthlessness. I allowed degrading things to be done to me because I was numb, I was dead inside I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Since I have stopped watching porn, since I stopped allowing it in my life and in my home, I began to heal. That healing took a long time; it was hard to do when I was living with a man who was still taking power from a real, live woman, the way he and I had both taken power from the women on the screen.

For those of you out there who do not believe that pornography is degrading to women, I ask you something. For men, would you want your daughter, your sister, or your mother being treated the way that men treat women in pornography? Think for just a moment about your father calling your mother a whore while making love to her? How about the thought of your daughter laying on her back spreading her vagina wide open for a stranger and the camera?

You don’t think porn is degrading? I suspect that if you ask yourself the above questions honestly you will find yourself with answers that belie what you say to others.

For women. If you don’t believe that you’re getting power from pornography then ask yourself, would you really WANT to have 3 men ejaculate on your face? Would you really want a woman to don a strap on and fuck YOU doggy style while calling you a whore and a slut?

Would you be a porn star yourself? With everything it entails, rather than the Jenna Jameson fairy tale? Would you be the free internet girl?

First of all, if you are a male and you frequent strip clubs and use escorts, I want you to know that those women hate you.

If you’ve ever given money to a stripper, you’ve probably given money to a girl or woman who has spent the last 20 minutes laughing at you, either with the other girls or on the inside. You buy a lap dance and inside she’s criticizing you, laughing at you, mocking you. She’s mocking what you’re wearing, how you’re speaking and everything about you.

When a man would pay me to give him a lap dance I would spend the entire time internally laughing at his breath, his pimples, his fat belly, anything and everything I could. These women hate you, and no amount of money you can give them will make them like you any more.

I was underage when I was enmeshed in this life; I had just gotten a car and I was barely 16 years old. I can remember, very vividly, the first night I stripped. I was terrified. That first night was at a hotel that was pretty strict with its nudity policy, and all I had to do was wear lingerie and then try to sell it and garters. Easy…right?

I nearly chickened out entirely, but I had just been kicked out and needed that paycheck, I needed the promised tips and the ‘big money’ that everyone talked about. I was young and scared and needed to come up with my rent money quickly. Deanna was trying out her first night as an escort while I began here, in the hotel. It was terrifying, but I got through it. Halfway through the night customers began buying me drinks. I don’t know how many I consumed but I remember being concerned about driving home.

Through that period of time I not only stripped. I also did bachelor parties and worked as an escort. The degradation and terror that is always there is just another part of the job. The hands, the greasy, disgusting hands, were always there, groping at you while the eyes were staring at you. I was little more than a walking Barbie doll, and I was critiqued by some, and worshipped by others. Of course, that worship consisted of men telling me what “nice tits” I had, or how they’d like to “bang that pussy”.

See, here’s the deal: just as the men who come to the bar have to be completely devoid of empathy for the women they’re buying, the women also have to be completely devoid of empathy for the men who are buying them. It’s a survival thing, and besides, how can we like you when you’re paying to own us? No, oftentimes women will think and fantasize about smashing your head in with a baseball bat while they gyrate in your lap. But of course, we can’t really do that can we? For whatever reason, we must allow ourselves to be bought and sold for the erections that men get over the power associated with owning a human being.

So, while we may be thinking about how disgusting your teeth are, how horrible your breath is, what a stupid shirt you’re wearing and how we’d like to run a cheese grater over your smug face, we’re smiling and looking at you through submissive eyes as we robotically rub our bodies over yours. But that anger has to go somewhere doesn’t it? And, just as with everything else, it does. The anger turns into something else, and oftentimes it is turned inwards. We starve ourselves and abuse ourselves, and let you abuse us because we believe we deserve it. Other times we dull the pain, using alcohol and downers to rid ourselves of the anger, to crush it and keep it in check.

Most often we use several of these options simultaneously. We turn our anger onto other women, onto ourselves and onto our children but we can’t turn that anger onto men; that would be too dangerous. We learn, very early on and particularly when we strip, that men are dangerous. They are more dangerous than anything else we’ve ever known.

Be assured that the stripper you see hates you. She drowns her hatred in alcohol, or burns it in a cloud of pot smoke, but she’s still angry.

The life of a stripper is a life of sexual harassment. Men grope at you constantly, trying to put their fingers inside of you when you walk past. You are called names, and told to “Bring that cunt over here you little whore”. And you do. You bring it over there because you’ve told yourself that you are powerful when you do so. That’s yet another way to control the anger and the humiliation. You wrap it in empowerment, telling yourself that you’re the one who’s really coming out on top. You tell yourself that you’re the winner because that nasty fucker gave you every bill in his wallet, but deep down inside you know what’s really going on and you continue to medicate, you continue a cycle of ups and downs.

Sometimes, as a 16-year-old stripper, I would find myself on the floor of my rented bedroom at Deanna’s house, surrounded by the things I had taken from my room at my parent’s house. I had a stuffed clown and large black and white stuffed panda bear. At times I would fall into a heap on the floor of that bedroom, an ashtray and a can of Old Milwaukee beer at my feet, while I cried into the fur of that panda bear. I remember thinking that if one more man tried to stick his fingers inside of me that night then I’d fucking kill myself. I remember looking longingly at kitchen knives but always being too terrified to actually do it. And then, about an hour before we were due to leave, Deanna might knock softly on the door.

Sometimes, we lay on that floor together and cried. Me, a 16 year old girl with a bag of vibrators, dildos and anal beads stuffed into a briefcase for use with my ‘clients’ on the escort side of the business, and Deanna, a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman whose face showed more pain than any face I have known before or since. Sometimes we’d cry on the floor of that bedroom and then, after our tears were spent, we’d stand and smile and hug each other and go about the task of getting our things together.

We’d change into our makeup and our clothes and we’d leave and drive to whatever club we were due at, or to the office itself to await the phone calls of the men who wanted to buy us.

As a 16 year-old stripper I had men throw alcohol on me, I’ve been spit on and then been paid to rub it into my skin. I’ve been fingered by complete strangers as I walked past them. I’ve been slapped, grabbed, pinched and mauled by several men at once. I was called names and had my hair pulled. I’ve had men take their dicks out of their pants and I’ve had men cum in their pants during a lapdance and then try to stick their hands in my mouth.

I’ve had men ask me my age, and on the rare occasion when I would tell them the truth, perhaps from some hope that they could help me, they told me that I was the same age as their daughter and then offered me money to sleep with them. I’ve heard sob stories about their horrible wives and families, and how the bitch stopped putting out as soon as he put a ring on their finger. I’ve heard all the stories, all the lies and all the bullshit.

I’ve had men call me the most vile things imaginable and I’ve had them pay me to do the sort of degrading things I can’t even talk about.

The anger that stems from this is all consuming; it eats away at you slowly, despite the efforts you make to contain it. A full 17 years later and I’m still enraged. The seed that was planted all those years ago has turned into a tree and that tree has branches that are vast. Every thread of anger goes down another path until I find even more anger at the end of it.

I remember now how angry men would get at me when I told them that the woman who stripped for them the night before was most likely silently laughing at your hair or teeth or bad clothes. I think about how angry men have become when I tell them that the poor woman whom he tossed his $20 at would probably just as soon have gouged his eyes out with her nails as looked at him. I remember how mad these guys got, how they seem to think that they should be able to buy not only the bodies of these women to degrade and to use, but that these women should also be grateful for it, they should actually like him.

They think to them, “Hey, I’m a nice guy! I was nice to her!” but never once do they connect the fact that buying another human being for the purpose of controlling that human is NOT a ‘nice guy’ thing to do. Of course she should like it, she’s a whore and she should love it when I give her money for doing what she would normally be doing for free anyway. They always seem so shocked when I tell them the extent of the hate. When I tell them the things that us girls would say behind their backs, or after our set when we would get back to the house. These men seem livid and surprised that we would discuss how you were so fucking disgusting that it was all we could do not to throw up on you. Then, we’d knock back another shot.

Thinking about these guys, these men who get insulted that the object they purchased wasn’t particularly enamored with them, makes me even more irate.

The rage still consumes me, the anger lies just below the surface.

I remember it well, and now as I sit here typing on my laptop in my bedroom I realize that the anger and indignation is still just below the surface. I am disgusted by them. I am enraged at them. At this moment I can say that I literally HATE each and every single man who thought it was his entitlement to BUY a human being.

I learned that it wasn’t about sexual excitement for these guys; it was about entitlement and degradation. It was about power and control, it was about owning another person, another human being. They were rarely just happy with just buying us, they wanted to degrade us and make us perform disgusting acts for them. I know that these men who visit strip clubs and who watch pornography and who pay prostitutes would also buy a slave to work the fields if they thought they could get away with it. These men who like to believe that they are forward-thinking ‘nice’ guys are the same men who would buy a slave, and to be completely honest, I don’t give a flying fuck if that enrages them or not. These are the men that would buy another human being because they get off on power and control.

Buying a woman is little different than buying a slave, and I’ve been bought before. Cloaking it in ‘free will’ is a lie, a great big steaming lie. How much ‘free will’ does a 16 year-old have when she’s been kicked out? Every girl I knew, every single one of them that I worked with, had stories. Those stories are stories that curdle the blood, stories of rape and incest, stories laden with abuse and selling the only thing they had of value in this society.

There is no doubt in my mind that these very men would purchase slaves, sexual or otherwise to work their fields and jerk them off when they wanted it.

Men who buy and look at pornography are exactly the same. These are also men who feed off of power and degradation the way a tick feeds off blood. They are parasites and they are incapable of finding any worth within themselves, therefore, they steal it from women, they take it and use it and then they look for more power when the rush of degradation has worn off. They believe, with every fiber of their being, that they have a right to buy human beings.

I want, once and for all, for men to know that women in the sex industry have been abused by men just like you. Rape and incest are the recruiters for the sex industry, and you are victimizing her just as her rapist did. She hates you and she hates all that you represent. She smiles because she must smile, she dances because she knows no other way, but she despises you and others like you.

{Editor’s Note: I don’t know the original title of this post, and the last few paragraphs are missing. If you have a better version, please contact me.}

Several years into my second marriage, my husband, like so many others, came to me with a problem. Our sex life was getting ‘boring’, why don’t we try to ‘spice it up’? I was a bit puzzled since, to me, the sex was fine and dandy, but I was open-minded and had a “Sure, I’ll try anything once” outlook. So, with that in mind, my X took a trip to the local sex store and came home with a pair of fuzzy cuffs.

At first, I kind of enjoyed it. The reasons for this, I have since come to understand, were a direct result of my earlier abuses. I fell into a submissive role easily and readily. In some way, I was trying to act out my earlier rapes in a ‘safe’ environment and, just for the record, that is not healthy either. However, at the time, this seemed like a ‘safe’ way to regain control of earlier abuses in a ‘controlled’ environment.

Soon, however, it escalated. It began with fuzzy cuffs with cute little ‘safety releases’ which worked well to soothe me into believing I actually had control. Eventually, it moved to Velcro stuff which was more difficult to actually remove if I wanted to. All the while he was bringing me home BDSM magazines and videos with women as submissives. The material became more and more hardcore and he wanted to play out every picture in the magazines and videos with/on me.

Honestly, I’m not sure when I began feeling unsafe, I’m not sure at what point the ‘therapeutic’ reenactment of my previous rapes became not-so-therapeutic and, more than that, damaging, but it did happen. The nightmares came back, haunting me in my sleeping hours. My self-esteem plummeted, and I began internalizing the things that my husband told me while having sex. I began to believe I was a whore, a slut and that I liked to be hurt.

The dominance play gradually escalated as each new ‘thing’ quickly got ‘old’, and was rejected in favor of something more extreme, more painful and more degrading. I have since heard of this process of desensitization and now I understand what was happening; what was once titillating and exciting for him, quickly became an old hat and something new came in to take its place. The new stuff was always a bit more extreme than the old stuff.

In the time that I lived with BDSM, I watched as the abuse began to escalate. And I was confused, I was frustrated. I didn’t know whether I liked it or not. I knew I hated the clamps and the chains and the whips but I didn’t hate the way he seemed to value me when it was happening.

I felt like a sort of traitor. He would talk to me, tell me how much he loved me, as he was tying me up, spread eagle, to our marriage bed. He would kiss me gently, more gently than he ever kissed me before we fell into this strange ‘fantasy’ of BDSM. Then he would hit me, or whip me, or stick strange things inside of me and I was supposed to like it. I knew, somewhere inside of me, that I was supposed to like it. The confusion set in and my mind became divided. This was my husband, the man I had sworn to be with, the man who pledged his love to me. Surely, he didn’t WANT to hurt me, and, even if he did, it was my husband, the man I loved. The man who loved me. I was supposed to be enjoying his attentions.

Love, sex, rape and pain became synonymous with one another. Sex didn’t exist without pain. Love didn’t exist without being called a slut, a whore, or a dirty nasty little slut whore. My concept of love began to twist into something so alien that I fight, right now, as I’m writing this, for the words to describe it. Rape didn’t exist, it was simply sex. Sex didn’t exist, it was always rape. Love couldn’t exist without degradation and the phrase “Love Hurts” began to take on a whole new meaning for me.

I became a divided woman. When he came to me in the morning and put the nipple clamps on me I knew that I was not free. What began with fuzzy cuffs and playful ‘spanking’ ultimately led me to a place where the man I loved tried to seal my vagina with hot wax. And you know what? It was all the same. By that time, pain, love, sex and rape, abuse, and degradation were all the same. Respect was nonexistent and the saddest part of all, the part that makes my heart hurt even now as the memories race through my head and my hands shake from the fear welling within me, is that I didn’t know the difference.

His muttered “I love you” was the same as his “You like that you little whore, don’t you?” His fingertips trailing down my side was the same as the numbing pain when he fisted me after hitting my genitals with a whip.

The previous abuses I had endured, my rape when I was a child, became the same as the ‘sex’ we were engaging in. The line disappeared, and, for a time, I didn’t think that there was such a thing as rape, so hazy had the line in my head become. Of course, a part of me rallied against this, and it was that part that insisted on showing me nightmares at night. That part of me wailed at the division, it insisted on reminiding me, in mind numbing horror that I had been raped. At night my head showed me everything for what it was. Flashbacks, nightmares, insomnia, anxiety attacks, all of these things haunted me daily.

I think that the first time I felt ‘real’ terror was when I looked down at him with a needle in his hand, poking into the skin of my nipple, drawing blood, threatening to pierce it. I screamed in terror and unadulterated horror as the cross stitch needle, the very needle that I had used to make the wall hanging in my living room, disappeared into my flesh. When I screamed he stopped, put his hand up, and clamped it over my mouth. I felt fear. I felt it wash over me and all the pretenses fell away. I knew I wasn’t in control. I knew that his words had been lies. His reassuring words, whispered in a husky voice that I was ‘Safe’ that “No matter what happens know that I won’t hurt you, I love you” I knew it was lies. I saw behind the veneer and I was terrified at what I saw.

From there on the rift inside of me widened. My ‘Mouse’ (the part of me who was the quiet, meek, finishing school girl) told me that I was being silly. She soothed me with her words, telling me that I was simply being unfair to him to suddenly desire to deny him what he so obviously wanted from me. She told me that I had the ability to make him happy and here I was denying him. She reminded me how hard he worked to provide for us and how I was a traitor if I believed that he could or would, actually hurt me badly. Every time he raised the bar she excused it and I believed her, or I tried to anyway.

On the other side of the divide was the Warrior. She screamed at me to kill him, to hurt him, she screamed at me that he was raping me. The Mouse countered by telling me that I enjoyed it, how could it be rape if I enjoyed it? And, even if I didn’t enjoy it, I was his wife and that’s what women do they sacrifice and THAT is the greatest power of all. The two sides began warring for control, the Warrior telling me that pain and sex and love and rape are NOT the same, they are different, they are opposite poles on different ends of the galaxy. The Mouse told me what is pleasure without pain? What is love without anxiety? And mostly, she argued that I was being so uptight.

Meanwhile the abuse continued and escalated.

At the high point of my abuse, cloaked as BDSM, he would insert things into my rectum and force me to go to the store. He tried, on several occasions, to ‘seal’ my vaginal lips closed with wax, or clamps. Rape became not only inevitable but indistinguishable from sex. He held me down amid my screaming protests and raped me, and it was the same as the sex. There was no difference. I took it all as different shades of grey in our ‘enlightened’ sex life.

I began to doubt that my rape at 10 had even occurred, as in, was it even rape? How could it have been, when it was the same as what was happening in my bedroom all the time? How could it be rape? Surely, I wouldn’t be living with a rapist? Surely, the man who told me he loved me couldn’t actually be a rapist? My mind refused to latch onto that concept, the Mouse would have none of it and the Warrior screamed from beyond the chasm in my mind.

Abuse and pain were the norm of my life for a period of about 5 years.

Finally, I spoke to him. Finally, I told him that I was tired of BDSM. I told him I longed for the days when he had actually made love to me. When he was tender without ropes, without chains, without pain and spit and whips. I cried. I asked him, in my desperation that day, to “Please, just make love to me. Please make love to me now, prove to me that you still can.” I told him I needed, craved, desired a gentle touch without pain.

He tried. Until he entered me, then his hand crept to my neck and there it was, the same old dominance. He squeezed my neck and I was gasping for air as my head got light. I cried as he ‘made love’ to me and the tears flowed freely down my face before dropping onto his hand. He kissed the tears away as I cried and it was then that I realized that this was not love. He was incapable of love and I wondered and I heard my warrior crying out to me, I heard her words from across the divide and my heart sank and my tears dried as he finished the act.

From then on I resisted him, I resisted the BDSM. I tried to tell myself I had won, I tried to tell myself that he no longer took out the whips and the chains and leather lay unused in a duffle bag under the bed. But I hadn’t won; every time we had sex, he had a hand on my throat, he had a hand pinning my wrists.

It has been pointed out as of late that rape existed long before pornography did. This is generally used as a blanket statement to exonerate porn from any ill effect. Obviously, there are several problems with this idea, though it seems like a strong enough thought on the surface.

Sure, rape has existed before pornography was invented, if we assume that cave paintings aren’t pornography. (For those of you who use the defense that porn has been around in the form of cave paintings for that long I’d also like to point out that rape has been around that long as well so you’re kinda shooting yourself in the foot with that defense) For the purposes of this discussion we’re going to assume that porn, as we know it, has been around for about 30 years give or take.

For us to determine what role porn plays in rape, we first have to determine what rape is. Is rape sex? Is rape control? Is rape a hybrid between the two?

Rape is using sexuality as a weapon to punish or control another human being. For rape to occur at least one other thing must happen. The rapist needs to see his victim, not as a human being, but as a creature that is less than he is. He has to have lost his ability to empathize with her pain. He has to view his victim as little more than an object. Objects do not feel. Objects do not object to their treatment. Objects do not have a say in what they are, they just are.

Here’s what I contend. Porn causes rape because porn is built on the same principals that rape is built on. Control, domination and objectification. Porn doesn’t cause all rape, but all rapes share the same values that porn shares. Control, domination and objectification.

These things are present in each and every rapist. The core belief that a woman’s desires are less important than a man’s desires. That a man’s desires have a right to be fulfilled by any means necessary. The core belief that women are simply a means to an end. An ideology that includes controlling people around him. These are all touted, with great reverence, in pornography.

In pornography, sex becomes violence. Slapping buttocks, calling women names, dehumanizing them, all are part and parcel of pornography. All of this does a fine job of conflating sex with violence and those are the VERY things that rapists have in common; conflating sex with violence.

Rape is a crime that perverts control with sex. It is a way to hurt women through their sex. To control women via their sex.

Porn perverts sex with control. It defines women by their sex, objectifying them in the process. Pornorgraphy is a medium through which pain and pleasure become almost inextricably linked.

Rapists are not born, they are made, and our society is making them. Porn is making them. It is making and creating rapists by instilling the very same notions of control, dominance, submission and sex that all rapists have.

No, porn doesn’t cause all rapes. Nobody has suggested that. Although, the porn apologists have a hard time seeing that and they make an assumption that if rape has been around since before porn that porn cannot be causing rapes. What they’re NOT looking at is that porn holds so many of the same ideologies that rapists hold that the two are intrinsically linked.

In porn we see a woman being fucked by a man. Her screams of ‘pleasure’ are eerily similar to a scream of pain. As he is fucking her he may be slapping her on the buttocks, he may be calling her ‘Whore’, ‘Cunt’ or ‘Slut’.

In rape we see a woman being fucked by a man. Her screams are screams of pain, which are eerily similar to the screams of ‘pleasure’ from a porn star. As her rapist is fucking her he may be slapping her, he’s probably calling her a ‘Whore’, a ‘Cunt’ or a ‘Slut’.

In porn we see women, stripped, the focus is on their parts they are objects for consumption.

Rapists do not rape humans, they rape objects.

Porn creates rapists by hardening them to a woman’s protests, by hardening men to women as HUMANS first and women second. The values taught in porn are identical to the values of the rapist.

There can be little doubt that porn causes men to view women through a callous lens. It allows them to disassociate from them entirely. In porn, women are presented as objects, nothing more, and the number one thing that a rapist has to possess is the ideology that women are objects.

There is no way around this. Sure, there are other mediums in which women are objectified, it happens all the time, but porn is the only media which displays sex, objectification and control all in ONE package. It is the ONLY medium in which pain and pleasure become inextricably linked. The ONLY medium in which women are so clearly dehumanized and degraded. And those people who refuse to see it, those people who claim that they CAN’T see it, the ones who say that there is nothing dehumanizing about being called names while engaged in sexual intercourse, are already dead to women.

If a person is unable to see how the acts in pornography degrade, dehumanize and objectify women then they are already useless to women. They are already on their way to meeting at least one of the criteria of a rapist, that criteria being decreased and/or no empathy towards women.

I say that the ideas and messages inherent in pornography, in ALL pornography, is a glorification of the rapist’s mentality. Pornography is not just a byproduct of a sick society; it is a documentary of a sick society, a reflection of a sick society, and an instruction manual for being a member of a sick society. Just like the Gladiatorial Games were a reflection of, a documentary of, and an instruction manual for the brutality of ancient Rome.

And if an Emperor in ancient Rome passed decrees and laws intended to make Rome a peaceful, less brutal place with peaceful people, but without changing or banning the Gladiators, it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good. You’d have a Rome that preaches peace but whose people were still violent.

Apply that to pornography. Want a real-world example? Look at Sweden. Every politician has to claim to be a “feminist” to get elected, and they have scads of “feminist” laws on the books… but they still have rape, sexual violence, glass ceilings, and most of the other problems associated with mindsets. Not just any mindset, but mindsets that porn promotes.

A society can often be judged by its most popular form of entertainment. Pornography is a 56 billion dollar a year industry, which is more than the NFL, MLB, NHL, and NBA combined. That’s more than the yearly revenue of ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox combined. Pornography is unquestionably our most popular form of entertainment. It is a reflection and a reinforcement of what our society values.

Are the porn values the same values you’d want your children to learn in school? Porn values nothing more the degradation and dehumanization of half the population to make the other half feel secure in their dominance.

Pornography and rape are not related by some mystical “common cause” any more than bomb making and publishing the Anarchist’s Cookbook are. They are simply reflections of each other, and pornography FEEDS rape. Rape FEEDS pornography. It’s a vicious cycle that has to be broken somehow. But that’s another post .

Pornography causes rape. The evidence shows it no matter how you try to twist it around. The “common cause” of pornography and rape could be said to be a society that exists on the domination and oppression of a female sex class, but then you have to take into account how both pornography and rape help create that society. It becomes a chicken-and-egg scenario, and as long as we keep chasing our tails trying to find out for certain which one is the REAL root cause before we try to fix any of it, it won’t get fixed.

Pornography is a documentation of rape. It is not a symptom of a sick society; it is a propaganda reinforcing the values and methods of the sick society. Maybe it was a symptom at one time, but now it has become an equal part of the problem.

How can we work for equality for women while ignoring or promoting(!) an industry that feeds off of inequality at every level? How can we claim we want equality, respect, and justice for women when we traffic with an industry that shows, documents, promotes, and glorifies the exact opposite of those things? Is being called a “cunt” empowering? Respectful? Equal?

Is it possible for a white guy to call a black man a “n****r” (I tried, but I still couldn’t force myself to type that word out) and still not be racist? Is it possible to empower African Americans through black face and minstrel shows? Is it possible to work for the ACCEPTANCE and EQUALITY of African Americans while we still watch, support, and absorb the concepts displayed in minstrel shows?

Porn is a minstrel show, with women instead of African Americans (and there’s a ton of racism in pornography as well, which we’ll get to in another post). Minstrel shows didn’t cause all racism, but will anyone say they didn’t significantly contribute, in a causative manner, to a racist society?

Arguing about a “common cause” or “what came first” is ineffective and a distraction. Pornography is a cause of rape. Eliminate pornography, and we will eliminate a lot of rape. Sure, there are other problems to address, other things that condone, support, and contribute to a rape culture, but pornography strengthens ALL of them. Pornography is the mouthpiece of the Patriarchy, through which all if its values are disseminated.

Until we begin to deal with that mouthpiece, until we stop allowing men to use women’s vaginas, breasts, and anus’s to speak their own agenda, our rape rates will continue to climb. Until we figure out what to do with this megaphone called pornography, we will continue to see women suffer at the hands of it. And make no mistake about it, women ARE suffering.

Perhaps porn, as a medium, didn’t cause my rapes. Porn didn’t force my x husband to rape me. What it DID do was reinforce that his desires were appropriate. That sex and rape were interchangeable. That my pleasure and my pain were indistinguishable. It told him that I’d like it. It also gave him the boner he needed to do the job effectively. It was ammunition for him, showing him creative ways he could rape me. It Showed him that fisting was something that women liked. That I should like it.

Pornography was a reflection of a society that told him that these things are normal, acceptable and pleasurable. Until people stop being selfish and understand that there are other human beings, other lives outside of their own existence, we will never have freedom.

It doesn’t matter whether rape was around first or whether porn was around first. I think that everyone can agree that rape is a crime of power.

I have often been accused of being ‘against male sexuality’ from, surprise, men. These statements always bother me, and not in an “OMG! You’ve helped me to see the light!” but rather in a “What the hell are they talking about?” kind of way.

I am always rather surprised when some dude steps forward to say, “What the hell BB? You’re so anti-male and anti-male sexuality!” because, quite frankly, it makes no sense to me. When a man asks me the question, “How are we supposed to act in regards to women?” I am always floored, so much so that I rarely bother answering the questions because it seems so frigging simple to me. Nevertheless, I have decided that I shall create a list of sorts in which I posit exactly what I’m asking for. It has become apparent to me that I need to do such a thing because apparently, long, well-thought out posts that detail every given aspect of behaviors that I find reprehensible are not doing the trick.

So here, for the convenience of my male readers who don’t ‘get’ it and who ask me to please explain better (after I’ve done 300 and some odd posts that average six pages a piece on every aspect of female oppression at the hands of males that I can think of) I have attempted to devise a list.

What do I expect from males? It’s really rather simple.

1.No means No: I take this one very literally. She says “No” you stop. Period. No begging, no harassing, no arguing, no guilt trips, no nothing. All attempts at sexual behaviors stop here, at this one little word. If the word “No” escapes her lips at any time during the activities it is YOUR cue to a full stop. No more “if you loved me you’d do x” No more excuses, no more bullshit. No means No. Get it? Got it? Good.

2. Stop othering us- This is another of my pet peeves. Stop thinking of women as just being ‘wired differently’. Just because your mother cleaned up after you your entire life doesn’t mean she ‘just likes it’. Just because the women in the porn you view appear to love having dicks crammed in every available opening doesn’t mean that SHE likes it. We are not fundamentally ‘different’ from you. When you use this as a basis for your expectations of female/male relationships you will always, each and every single time, attribute the exact OPPOSITE characteristics to a female that you attribute to yourself.

3. Stop staring at us- We are not freaks in a zoo. Our purpose in this world is not to be YOUR eye-candy. Just stop it. Stop staring at the woman in line who you think is ‘fuckable’. Stop undressing us with your eyes. Stop muttering shit under your breath, stop giving us the full body stare. You know, I went to the zoo yesterday with my partner and my children and do you know how many ‘hotties’ were there?

Neither do I. Why? Because, I’m not interested in grading people, ANY person, on their tits, their asses, their oh-so-manly 5’oclock shadow or their washboard abs. Seriously, I have no fucking CLUE if anyone there was ‘hot’ by societal standards. And no, not because I’m a fathairylesbiandykeprudebitchwhojustneedsagoodfucking but rather because I’m not so preoccupied with the thought of fucking that I can only see people as potential fuck toys. Seriously, this preoccupation with fucking and who is fuckable and who’s hottt and who’s nottt is ridiculous. So stop it. Stop staring at us and stop rating us.

4. Put the porn down- Yep, you heard me. The suffering of MILLIONS of women is what you’re viewing. Stop making excuses, stop saying, “Well, it’s not in MY porn” when anyone who has done any research on the topic will tell you that each and every single large manufacturer of porn has had scandals involving under aged women, trafficked women, or otherwise. Just put it down. Stop excusing it and stop creating this fucking double standard that you have. Sure, you’ll boycott Nike, or Wal-Mart, but gosh fucking forbid that you give up your jerk off material. You want to know what I want from you? It’s simple. Stop ignoring our pain for your own chubby erections.

5. Stop objectifying us- This goes hand in hand with ‘othering’ but it’s still worth a mention. Stop using our bodies as status symbols for you. Stop being proud that your girlfriend is ‘acceptable’ to your buddies. Stop being ashamed when she’s ‘too fat’ by the standards of your buddies. Stop the excuses and stop being blind to it. If you happen to fall in love with a woman who is culturally beautiful then stop patting yourself on the back when your buddies say, “Whew, good catch friend!” or when men stare at your girlfriends ass. Stop using her to bolster your self-esteem. We are not objects. We are humans and there is sooooooo much more I could write on this one but I’ll stop for the sake of becoming even MORE long winded than usual.

6. Stop laughing at sexist jokes- That joke about the ‘dumb blonde’ on the Wal-Mart horse ride is sexist. Get over it. Stop supporting men in your work place when they leer at the company secretary who’s stuck in pink collar hell and who’s working to support 2 kids but who has nice tits that the other guys talk about at lunch. Stop laughing at rape jokes, stop taking it lightly and when you see it call out others on it.

8. Stop buying us- Stop consuming women as though they were oatmeal. Stop believing that men have a ‘right’ to buy the use of a woman’s body for their sexual pleasure. Prostitution, strip clubs, pornography, all of these are excellent examples. Stop believing that because you have a dick, women, or a group of women should be available for you to buy. If you don’t believe that women should be available for purchase then you cannot support these industries.

9. Stop believing that rape is rare- It’s NOT rare. It’s NOT a small occurrence being perpetrated by a select few individuals who are just ‘born that way’. Women, real live women who exist in this society, know that rape is NOT rare. Those of us who have studied these things know the official numbers and we know that the closer numbers can be closer to half of us. That’s NOT rare. That’s NOT one lone man running around violating up to half of the population of females. WE know this. It’s time for YOU to know it, internalize it, believe it and act accordingly as well.

10. Stop fantasizing about hurting us- STOP thinking of triplexxxteens. Just fucking stop it. Children are NOT acceptable masturbatory fodder. Raping women is NOT acceptable masturbatory fodder. Stop excusing it; stop accusing those of us who fear you because you think that rape is hottt of being ‘thought police’. If your thoughts are dangerous then you need to look at that. You think it’s so fucking wonderful? Fine, how do you feel about someone masturbating to the thought of violently raping your mother, your girlfriend or your daughter? You lovin’ that thought? Then YOU need to stop it as well. No excuses, no bullshit. Just knock it off.

Now, if you men out there believe that this is all part and parcel of male sexuality then I’m afraid that you’re a bigger ‘man hater’ than you accuse me of being. If you believe that raping, objectifying, staring, leering, bullying, minimizing and supporting female hating industries are ‘normal male sexuality’ then gosh, do I ever feel sorry for you. I, for one, do not believe that this is the ‘normal’ state of affairs for men and I believe that they can pull themselves out of the poisoned society in which we live to carve out a more egalitarian society from which women and men would benefit.

If YOU believe that it is in the ‘male nature’ to visually assault, assess, grade, degrade and objectify each and every woman you see based upon your interpretation of her ‘fuckability’ then YOU are the one with the problem.

If YOU believe that it is in the ‘male nature’ to enjoy, feed off, be aroused by, or masturbate to women’s pain in ALL porn, then it is YOU who has the problem.

If YOU believe that it is in the ‘male nature’ to laugh at, joke about, bond over and find humorous the verbal assaults framed as ‘jokes’ on women, then it is YOU who has the problem.

If YOU believe that it is in the ‘male nature’ to talk into, nag, harass, scare, intimidate, pressure, coerce or otherwise ‘get’ sex from a woman when she says “No” then it is YOU who have the problem.

If YOU believe that it is in the ‘male nature’ to believe that women, or a class of women, should be available to you to buy and sell then it is YOU who have the problem.

If YOU believe that it is in the ‘male nature’ to believe that women are somehow inherently different, strange, from Venus, confusing or ‘othered’ from you then it is YOU who have the problem.

If YOU believe that it is in the ‘male nature’ to masturbate to children, raping, bestiality etc and that this is perfectly normal, acceptable, desirable, harmless, and even good then it’s YOU who have the problem.

Does this spell it out enough? Because, see, I’m getting exhausted with the whole, “BB you just hate male sexuality” gig. It’s old. It’s tiresome and it’s clearly not true. When male sexuality does not impinge upon my right to exist and be free from YOUR sexuality if I don’t want it then you’re fine. However, when YOUR sexuality impinges upon my right to not be fearful, to not be intimidated, to not be stared at like a creature in a zoo it becomes MY problem.

You want to be sexual? You want to have your prized ‘male sexuality’ that’s fine and fucking dandy but DON’T impinge upon the rights of me and my sisters to live an existence that is FREE from YOUR sexuality. Stop forcing it on us and stop thinking that it’s your RIGHT to force it on us. Your rights end where MINE begin and I have a right to be free of whatever form of sexuality you decide to engage in.

MY sexuality is cemented, formed and pursued in such a way that I’m NOT impinging upon the rights of others. I didn’t spend my day at the zoo grading men or women on their perceived ability to turn me on. They are people FIRST. Fat, old, skinny, young, they are fucking PEOPLE and their existence in this life is not dependent upon whether they can make me hottt under the collar.

MY sexuality doesn’t require me to think about THEIR sexuality before anything else.

MY sexuality dictates that THEIR sexuality means exactly jack fucking shit to me because it’s simply NOT important unless and until we decide to become intimate with one another. THEN their sexuality, their hotttness factor, and everything else that’s wrapped up into it is probably something I should think about.

When you use others for the benefit of YOUR sexuality then you are impinging upon MY right to exist free from the effects of YOUR sexuality.

MY sexuality is not based around any thought I have given to whether or not a person will do something, say something, wear something or engage in any activity that I perceive to be hottt.

MY sexuality has nothing whatsoever to do with attempting to get anything from an individual. From oral sex, to particular touching, to anything that I may or may not enjoy it is NOT my job to tell them anything or affect, influence or otherwise meld THEIR sexuality around MY sexuality.

Sexuality is experienced it is not expected and MY sexuality tells me that influencing, asking, begging or otherwise affecting their sexuality is something I refuse to do. THEIR sexuality is akin to a flower. A flower just is it cannot, nor should it, be asked to be a different sort of flower. It cannot, or should not, be manipulated, controlled, or influenced by me despite what society has told me, and you, that flower shouldn’t be fucked with. I have no right to ask that flower to do something that doesn’t come naturally to that flower. Period.

MY sexuality allows me to experience the sexuality of others with NO interference from me. No demands, No presuppositions, No judgements, No thought of what they can do FOR me. If the sexuality of me and my partner jive with one another WITHOUT my forcing a ‘jive’ then all is good. It is never, ever my place to turn an iris into a rose. Again, I repeat my sexuality is experienced not expected.

Feel free to have YOUR sexuality, but don’t impinge upon the rights of me and my sisters to exist free from the effects of whatever the fuck you term as sexuality.

I got an email this morning from someone. It was an email talking about her repeated rape at the hands of a young man. This is not the first such letter I have received in my email and the feelings it evoked in me were neither uncommon, nor unique insofar as I have had them before.

The pain from these women bleeds through in their words, the screams I hear when I read their stories resonates so deeply inside of me that I tremble with barely contained rage, fear and sadness.

I have received several such letters since starting this blog. And more confessions and stories and voices than I can separate in the clutter that is my mind. Each and every woman on this site has a story, chances are good that it is that story that brought them here in the first place. Now, those stories may not be alike in the details, not every woman has been raped, not every woman has been abused, but every one of them has found a thread of commonality in a radical voice. For whatever reason they have seen the cancer infecting this society, seen its ugly face and the barren wasteland and dead women it has left behind.

I cried this morning. I locked myself in my bedroom for a few moments and I cried. I cried the tears of sadness and rage that explode from my soul each and every time I read another story. I sobbed quietly beneath my covers, not wanting to upset my children who were busy reading their books for school. I cried the tears of the victim and survivor and I cried for yet another life destroyed, shattered by the force that is male pride and entitlement.

As I read that email this morning, as I have done on other mornings when a commenter has been moved to write to me, I felt rage burning fresh in my blood. I felt sadness and a loss so deadly that it brings everything home to me. It reminds me, in violent waves, about the society in which we women are forced to live. A society in which half of the population hates us for no reason I can discern.

This has been a trying week for me. I’m working on Friday fun with Site meter and the searches that are there are terrifying in their honesty. “Beautiful girls being raped”, “Sluts being beaten and raped”, the searches march across my screen, a grim reality and testament to the world in which I live. It is a testament to the violence of men, the undiluted essence of hatred with which they view us.

And on this morning, there was another letter, another story, another scream from another woman who has joined the rank and file of the millions of survivors. Always, there is confusion in me when I see the proof of male violence and hatred towards women. Ever there is confusion, a sort of disjointed question that hangs thickly in the air, tainting my skin and forcing itself to be articulated.

”Why?”

That is the scream that rips through me. It is the question that lies unanswered and unspoken. Why? Why? Why? Why? WHY???? Why do they do this to us? Why do they hate with such ferocity? Why do they spoil and silence these beautiful voices that are just waiting to be heard? Why do they contaminate and rip and tear and steal from women?

This is the word, the question that I asked myself as I cried this morning. This is the one thought that tore through me, demanding an answer, but I know that no answer will ever come. No answer can quiet that scream. When they say, “It’s because I wanted to”, it doesn’t make it stop. I want to say “WHY did you want to?”, “What did we do to you?”, “Why didn’t you care?”, “Why does our pain bring you such intense pleasure?” Why? Why? Why?

They cannot provide a suitable answer, they cannot quiet the “Why?” flitting in and out of the corners of my mind. They cannot provide the answer anymore than they can give that girl back her life, anymore than they can undo the damage they wreak. There is no easy answer; there is only the reality of the millions of screaming voices, the millions of voices that have been silenced.

People come to me and say that radical feminism cannot be taken seriously because the women in it are largely composed of survivors (although, they say ‘victims’). I say that it is because of this that radical feminism needs to be taken seriously. We are the proof of male violence, right here is the most honest and sincere proof you can find. It is because we are so largely comprised of so many survivors, and not just survivors of rape and molestation, but survivors of male pride and violence in all of it’s forms it takes, that we need to be taken seriously.

, and all the others (I know your names but I can’t list them all, they ring through my head even as I type and I know that the numbers are too large to list) all of you have a story, a need, a desire. Each and every one of you has experienced the proof of male entitlement and violence. No, chances are good that not every one of you has experienced rape or sexual assault, but ALL of you have seen the truth and ALL of you have been affected by the hatred that men show us.

Occasionally, one of you reaches out to me, trying to make sense of it all and I, sadly, have no sense to give. I have no greater wisdom, no sage advice, no greater understanding of the unending question of “Why?” but there can be no doubt that your stories are just as real.

From the rage, to the sadness, to the helplessness and back to the rage, the stories are there. The violence, the entitlement, the ego, the aggression, all of us have felt it to some degree or another. From the woman who spends her entire day scrubbing toilets for minimum wage, to the women who have been harassed in the park or on the street all the way to the women who vowed to love a man only to find herself the recipient of his fists, down to the woman who went on that date with the ‘nice guy’ and ended her night being raped. All of you have stories and it is these stories and this deep seated, undying desire to make it stop that brings radicals together.

The letter I got this morning affected me down to that primal part of my soul and I felt the desperation that so many of us have felt. The overwhelming sadness and helplessness of it all. It woke that sleeping warrior within me who first cried for the loss of yet another woman, who screamed and mourned and sobbed for the loss of yet another one of us. But now she is angry again. And her anger feeds my desire, it is her indignation at the masses of women left behind, sold out, forgotten and silenced that compels me to push forward, even when I stop for a moment to sob and regain my footing. She fills me with anger and rage and focused energy to try and accomplish the impossible. And only when the rapes, beatings, and cycle of male violence has stopped will she be sated. I stand in the face of these men who search for, “slut rape”, and “sexy girls being beaten and raped”.

I stand in the face of all the men that have stolen my sense of safety and security. I stand in your face Richard, and Scott and Kevin. I stand in the faces of Steven and Shawn and Brian. I stand in the faces of all the men who would take what I never offered and I stand in the face of the fucker who stole the innocence and youth from the girl who wrote me just today.

I am your worst fucking nightmare.

Here is my promise to you Mr. “Story-Snuff”. I will be your conscience if you refuse to have one. I will be the screams that you tried to silence. I am your worst nightmare, the walking skeleton of the dead bodies of the souls that you destroyed with your violence, with your entitlement and with your ego. I will not shut up until you have felt, tenfold, the pain that you have wreaked upon the women you have encountered. I, and others like me, will force your eyes open to the pain that you have caused and if I have one desire that burns through me with the fiercest passion I have ever known it is this: I want for you to never have another moment of peace in your lives. I want you to never sleep soundly again, I want the souls of these women to haunt you for all eternity, even into your next life and the lives beyond that.

I am no longer a victim, I am a survivor and I will continue to tell every person I meet of you and your kind. I will force-feed the pain of millions down your putrid mouth until you vomit it up, then, I will force it down again.

You, all of you, every one of you that come to this blog looking for, “Sexy women being raped and beaten”, YOU are my mark and my crosshairs are firmly on you. You are the reason that we all have stories, you are the reason that every day more women, thousands more women, millions in the world, join the rank and file of the survivors and my voice is aimed at you.

I will not let you forget the screams until they have stopped. I am the ever present reminder of your fucked up entitlement and I will not be silenced until my ashes are thrown across the ground. My voice is small on its own, but it is a part of a sea of voices, a vast army of voices that is growing larger and stronger by the day. Each and every time you beat another woman, or rape another woman, or push your fucked up entitlement onto another woman, in whatever form it takes, you create another one of me. Do you hear that? You create another me.

The numbers keep rising and when they rise up and the sobs turn to cries and the cries to screams and the warrior in us that YOU created and YOU awoke comes seeking her vengeance then you will know that it was YOU who created us.

To my readers, I hear your voices, I believe your truths and you are not alone. Those of you who have felt male violence and who are scattered and afraid and unsure about yourselves take heart for there are millions of us in this world and those who have found our anger and our rage will speak until you feel able to do so. There are millions of hands extended to you, keep talking, keep speaking, your voice is powerful and your stories are truth. Don’t stop writing to me, and don’t stop talking, your voice is perhaps your most valuable weapon and your truth is an inspiration.

I think many of us have experienced That Moment. That moment we think we see the light, that moment of Power. The first moment may have been the moment in Middle School, maybe High School for ‘late bloomers’ that moment when we wore a shorter skirt than we normally did to school and suddenly, the boys who previously ignored us, flocked to us.

Perhaps we had The Moment when we were in our boyfriend’s car necking on a Friday night when we were supposed to be at the movies. The Moment when he looked at you and you saw something on his face that was strange, alien. Before The Moment girls were something to be avoided by boys, we were perhaps picked on, teased for having ‘cooties’. We spent our days at school watching other girls being teased or getting their asses grabbed. Maybe we saw the young boys gather around a certain girl and cry out things like, “Itty Bitty Titty Committee!” or, maybe we saw them snapping the strap on her brand-new training bra. Maybe we had seen the boys, standing at the bottom of the stairwell, taking turns looking up the stairs at the girls who were wearing skirts. Perhaps we saw that the girl was, in effect, helpless. There was no recourse available to her. Maybe we even watched, horrified, when she went to a teacher and we saw the teacher pat her on the head and tell her, “Boys will be Boys. Just ignore them honey and they’ll stop”.

There was certainly A Moment that came before the moment in the car. The first Moment, the moment when we realized with shock and a little bit of horror, that boys could act in almost any way they wanted in regard to our girlfriends and come out of it unscathed, or with only a slight warning from a teacher. We saw the boys acting with impunity, maybe we watched them circle around our girl-friends and take turns touching her ass while she circled and tried to play it off like she was laughing and joking with them rather than being the proverbial butt of the joke. Nevertheless most girls realized, rather early on, that we were helpless in the face of the boys.

If you were like me you may have beat the shit out of them back in Elementary School, while you were still physically able to do so. But all of that changed in Middle School. When we came back to school after a summer of climbing trees and romping with our friends we saw that the boys were much bigger than we were. They were also more aggressive than we remembered as well as louder and more brazen. Soon, many of us knew which girls we should avoid, which ones brought the most amount of torment onto themselves by some mechanism which may still be elusive to us. We watched as they went to the teachers, telling them that so and so boy snapped their bra-strap, or so and so boy touched their butt or even dry-humped them on the playground. We watched as the teachers wearily pulled the young offender to the side and reprimanded him half-heartedly and we watched as the same group of boys teased the ‘tattle-tail’ relentlessly on the schoolyard. We watched and we had A Moment.

We realized that we were powerless. There was probably fear, the fear of having them zone in on you, the fear of finding the group of boys as we rounded a corner in the hallway. I think that, to varying degrees, women have gone through this all over the country. Our times in school were a time when we realized that we were not, and never could be, Just Another Person.

We probably watched the boys calling each other ‘Sissy’, the very term that our Mothers and Fathers called us, but they were using it derogatorily, they were using our pet-name as an insult. We probably heard them laughing at one another, telling the weaker boy that he “Threw like a girl”, but…but…We were girls! What was this? We probably heard them taunt another boy who was crying on the playground by saying something like, “Cry little girl! Cry!!” and we looked at ourselves and thought, “Is there something wrong with being a girl?”

But all that changed, didn’t it? During our first years in school we had The Moment when we realized we were powerless from all but the most heinous of teasing. We learned that having our asses grabbed and being tormented about our breast size or having our bra-straps pulled were part and parcel of our lot as girls. It probably happened slowly, insidiously, until we realized, maybe many years later, that boys made us feel powerless, weak, afraid, and maybe even ashamed. Later we found another Moment, a Moment in which we saw Power.

That Moment may have been in the passenger side of the car, maybe it was at your parents’ house when they were out for the evening. You may have been kissing your boyfriend and you opened your eyes and saw….something. Something so alien that it failed to register in your consciousness, but your lizard brain got it, your lizard brain speaks that language and recognized what you saw. Power. For that brief moment you looked at him and knew, somehow, that he would do whatever you wanted if you would let him touch your breasts, or let him give you a hickey or let him do whatever it was that he may have wanted to do.

The Boy, the ever-powerful boy was giving you Power. The same boy who tortured you in 3rd or 4th grade. The same boy who ruthlessly pulled bra-straps and led the gang of other boys to touch your friend’s ass while she was walking down the hallway. The same boy who grabbed your purse and rooted through it, looking for the tampon or maxi-pad that they knew was in there. The boy who then pulled it out and stuck it to the floor or the wall or who just played “Keep away” with it until you were almost in tears from embarrassment but were too afraid to cry. The girls didn’t help, they just watched, terrified of bringing that wrath down onto themselves if they said anything. The teacher only mildly scolded them and you most likely went away feeling ashamed for being so upset. That very same boy was now looking at you with a look of Submission. A look of Desire. Desire so fierce that you knew that Power, the only Power you may have ever been allowed, resided in that gaze.

This is the Second Moment in our lives. The Moment we note that our boyfriends bulging crotch and bulging eyes gave us Power. From there on out we tried our best to recapture that Power. We curled our hair, we slathered our faces with makeup, we wore short skirts and shirts that showed the beginnings of our cleavage. We jostled with the other girls, competing for The Power. This was a new thing to us, this Power. We thought that we finally had insight, that we finally understood. Our sex was powerful if we flaunted it.

From there on out we turned on our girlfriends, getting angry at the girl who wore the short skirt and who was surrounded by the troop of boys. We saw the looks in their eyes and knew that she had The Power. We called her whore and slut, because we thought that she had The Power. And she did, didn’t she? The boys didn’t torment her in the same way. Instead, they seemed to accept her, to want to be around her. She seemed to be safe as long as she kept them desiring her. When she was desired they treated her well, they didn’t snap her bra, they didn’t torment her ruthlessly, they seemed, for all intents and purposes, to be treating her kindly and with respect.

“So,” we thought, “That is where Power lies”. And we believed it. We jostled for position, trying to be the one that stood out above the others. We learned that Power lay in the hands of boys and men.

I did all of this and more. I sought that Power for most of my life. I turned myself into the proverbial sex-kitten, evoking and wielding That Power like a sword, brandishing my sex for all to see, watching the men go glassy-eyed and slack-jawed as I gyrated on the dance floor in some bar late at night. My Power, my sense of self, was utterly reliant on THEM. And it was in this that I found the paradox of my supposed Power.

It occurred to me at some point that the Power I wielded was only an illusion of Power. My Power was utterly and completely dependent on men. All those years I thought I held a large Sword of Power and suddenly, I realized that my sword was a gift, given to me by the men who wanted me to believe I had Power. The edges were dull and it could not cut, it could not wound in any real capacity and then it became clear. The Power in my sword was false and I saw the sword for what it really was, a cheap Made-in-Taiwan plastic imposter.

It slowly dawned on me that Power given from the Powerful to the weak based upon the weak’s ability to entertain the Powerful was not Power at all. In other words, the Power I thought I had was only there because I chose to submit to the people who held the Real Power. The Men. Men were the keepers of ‘Real Power’ and I had succumbed to the inherent bargain. That bargain was that I was allowed to feel Powerful if I acted in the way that they wanted me to. I was allowed to feel Powerful as long as I continued to make them feel more Powerful than me. Make no mistake about it, all my capering and dancing and wooing served to make them feel MORE Powerful than me. They had the Power of the King and I had the Power of the Court Jester, Powerful only as long as I kept the King entertained.

I looked around and realized that I had been jostling for the position of Court Jester and you know what? I got that title, I got it and I wore it, but I thought it was a different title.

As the years flew by and the men got older I had to do more and more to keep my title intact. At first, way back in those early years, I had only to wear a short skirt. Then, I had to let a boy put his hand up my shirt, then down my pants. Finally, I had to let him inside of me and even that wasn’t enough to keep The Power. Soon, I had to writhe and contort my body in an effort to keep The Power I had been given. I began to live and breathe for the pleasure of men. Delighting in the scraps of Power I was allowed to have. Later, I had to pretend that I liked anal sex, I had to pretend that the man I was with was pleasuring me greatly. I had to scream and gyrate, I had to succumb to being called names like ‘Whore’ and ‘Slut’ and pretend I enjoyed it. As the years dragged on I had to work harder to keep my plastic sword, I had to scream louder and act more sheepish, I had to dumb-myself down for I realized that few Men liked it when I was more intelligent than they.

The day I looked down and realized my sword was plastic I realized I had also been duped. That I had sold myself to be the Court Jester. I had become the Porn-star, I had become ‘Every Man’s Fantasy’ I had managed to become the ‘Object of Desire’. There was nothing you could do to me that was too degrading, nothing that was off-limits. I craved that look in their eyes like a Junkie jonesing for a fix. It was, after all, the only ‘real’ Power I had ever known. Every man who met me lusted after me, my boobs were presented in push-up bras like fruits to be picked. My hair was styled in the fashion of ‘Just had hot-monkey-sex’ look, my eyes were suitably sultry and my gaze was always poised to meet the gaze of a man from under my eyebrows. I had mastered the art of appearing submissive yet sultry and Men continued to put plastic swords in my hands. Every movement I made was for the sake of the men around me and I was skilled at the art of presenting my body in the best light possible. My back was arched, my shoulders were back, and my chin was slightly down. This was the existence I carved out for myself and you know what? It worked. It worked right up until I realized that I had been tricked.

I made a vow that day, I vowed that I would capture THEIR POWER. The Real Power. The Power of Independence, the Power of Intelligence, the Power of Success. Since then I have been labeled many things. I have been called “Frigid”, my beliefs have been teased as being “Renaissance”, I have been called and labeled a “Prude”, I’ve been accused of being a “Man Hater” of being “Rabid” and “Extreme”. Many times it feels as though I’ve landed back in the days of Middle School and that I have become the girl that seemed to bring chaos with them, the girl who was tormented ruthlessly. I think I know now what those girls did to anger the boys so much. They were Taking Power. They had, somehow, seen that the sword was plastic and they refused to play the games that the boys wanted them to play for Power. Instead, these girls had shown that they wanted the Real Power, the plastic sword wasn’t enough for them and god, how this angered the boys.

Now, when I see young girls and women displaying themselves for that Plastic Sword of Power, my heart goes out to them. When I see Porn stars on the screen I see in their hands, the Plastic Sword. When I see “Girls gone Wild” I see, held in one small hand, that almighty Plastic Sword. When young girls pass me on the street looking like Barbie dolls I look sadly at their hands and realize that they too are clutching that Sword. And I’ve found through the years, that women hold onto that sword as tightly as possible, it saddens me but I don’t get angry, I can’t get angry because they don’t realize that the Sword is plastic, they don’t realize that they’ve actually gotten the job of the Court Jester, they believe they’re a bona-fide member of The Court.

They cloak themselves in ‘Empowerment,’ but Empowerment based upon how well you can contort your body is not Empowerment. Empowerment based upon how practiced you are at screaming the scream of the fake orgasm is not Empowerment. Empowerment based upon molding your body and your mind to make Men Feel Power is not Empowerment. These are the trappings of Court Jester and the Power bestowed upon you is the Power given to you by the Truly Powerful.

I believe that we, as women, will only find the true Sword of Power when we remove the trappings of achieving the Plastic Sword of Power. I believe that we, as Women, will only be Powerful when boys no longer tease in Middle School. I believe that we, as Women, will only be Powerful when we are no longer raped for profit. I believe that we, as Women, will only be Powerful when we refuse to allow our bodies and our sex to be bought and sold as commodities.